John Gunther on Hermann Göring

“His ambition as well as his vanity is enormous. On March 6, 1933, exactly one day after the elections which confirmed Hitler's accession to office, he ordered his portrait painted- with a book in his lap conspicuously titled Life of Napoleon. His pets are lion cubs. All of them, male or female, are named Caesar. He is as carnivorous as Hitler is frugal- brusque, impulsive, brutal. Testimony after the Munich Putsch of 1923 recorded his orders to "beat in the skulls" of his opponents "with rifle butts". His famous order to the police in February, 1933, to shoot "enemies" without question, really signalled the beginning of the Nazi terror. His ruthlessness is unthinking, spasmodic, hot-blooded. He is not a plotter like Goebbels. He has great executive ability, and this serves to make him doubly dangerous.”

“The two incidents which contributed most deeply to the motivation of his life came about in 1918, just after the Armistice. First, Goering refused to demobilize and surrender his planes. He was ordered to do so by the German General Staff, but he refused to obey, until he was finally brought to ground near Darmstadt. He said farewell to his fellow officers, toasting the day when Germany would be supreme in the air. His planes were then destroyed. He never got over this. The destruction of his precious aircraft, by men whom he considered his infinite inferiors, was a psychic shock from which he did not recover; his present passionate energy to build a new German air fleet is compensation. Second, after he had returned to Berlin, a socialist mob saw him in uniform and forcibly tore his officer's insignia from his coat lapels. Foaming with rage, he swore vengeance. His hatred of socialists, which is psychopathic in intensity, dates from that day. This incident is important to Nazi history. It is not entirely fanciful to assume that much of the Brown Terror was motivated by this incident.”

“The jokes about Goering are, of course, legion. Most of them, are predicated either on the resplendency of his uniforms or his abnormal size. He is not merely fat: he is fat atop an immensity of muscle. He moves with the vigor of a man a hundred pounds lighter: there is nothing torpid about him; his energy is terrific. But the story goes that he is so obese that he "sits down on his own stomach"; he and Emmy have to sleep in a tent: and he wears "corsets on his thighs." One story is that he dons an admiral's uniform whenever he takes a bath, with rubber duplicates to all his medals. A new unit of weight has been established in Germany- a "goering"- to signify the aggregate displacement of his decorations. Once he visited a steel factory and his companions were horrified to see him suddenly leave the floor and dart perpendicularly upward to the ceiling. Reason: an electro-magnet above had caught his medals. Another little story has him arriving late at a luncheon in Berlin, where he is to meet an eminent (and doubtless mythical) visiting Englishman. Goering apologizes for his tardiness, and says he has been out shooting. The Englishman turns to him with the lofty words, "Animals, I presume?" Goering, incidentally, is said to be fond himself of all the stories about him. Once, the legend has it, Hitler fell into a doze during a performance of Lohengrin. The Führer was too tired to keep fully awake. His eyes opened suddenly as the figure of the shining knight in armor took the stage. Hitler thought it was Goering. "Hermann," he shouted, "you are going too far." Goering's basic importance, if the present set-up lasts, is not his blood lust, not his position in Prussia, not his command of the Prussian police. What matters is his association with aviation. The next war will be fought in the air, and it is an ill-omen that a man like Goering, with his immense drive and ruthlessness, should be supremely responsible for the developments of the German air army.”